Joseph Stella
Joseph Stella
1877 - 1946
American painter and collagist of Italian birth. He arrived in New York in 1896. The following year he enrolled briefly in the Art Students League and then in the New York School of Art (1898), where his ability was recognized by William Merritt Chase. The Lower East Side subject-matter of Stella’s early work was similar to that of his contemporaries of the New York Ashcan school. In place of their dark-toned Impressionism, however, Stella’s early style was academic in the manner of late 19th-century Italian painting. His first important commission was to depict the industrial workers in Pittsburgh for Survey, a social reform journal.
In 1910–11 he returned to Italy, where he saw the work of Antonio Mancini, whose brighter colours, broken strokes and spontaneous effects brought about a change in his style. He did not make contact with the Futurists, however, until he arrived in Paris some time in 1911. There he also saw the work of Cézanne, Matisse and the Cubists and other Modernist developments. On returning to New York he exhibited at the Armory Show which opened in February 1913. Encouraged by the response of a few New York galleries and patrons, who, as a consequence of the show, began to exhibit and buy the most advanced art, Stella committed himself wholly to Modernism. At the Armory Show he exhibited Battle of Lights: Mardi Gras, Coney Island (1913; New Haven, CT, Yale U. A.G.), a synthesis of Futurist and Orphist aesthetics and methods that transforms the swirling crowds of the amusement park into confetti-like bits of bright colour.
Around 1916 Stella adopted a more representational, albeit archaizing imagery, using large-scale, simplified, two-dimensional shapes as seen in The Heron (c. 1918; New Haven, CT, Yale U. A.G.). In 1918 Survey commissioned him again to do a series of industrial drawings, this time in connection with the war effort. Possibly as a consequence of this, Stella turned to industrial imagery for the series of oil paintings for which he is best known. These include the Gas Tank (1918; Purchase, SUNY, Neuberger Mus.), Brooklyn Bridge (c. 1919; New Haven, CT, U. A.G.), Factories (c. 1921; New York, MOMA) and his most ambitious work New York Interpreted (1920–22; Newark, NJ, Mus.). The latter is a huge polyptych of five canvases, in which four of equal size (2.25×1.37 m) symmetrically flank a central canvas (2.53×1.37 m). The painting, which in format recalls Renaissance altarpieces, is executed in a Cubo-Futurist style and expresses Stella’s perception of modern technology as the new religion of the 20th century.
During the 1920s Stella spent some years in Italy. Several of his works from this period and later, including madonnas, nudes, landscapes and figure compositions such as the Holy Manger (c. 1933; Newark, NJ, Mus.), reflect the revival of interest in Giotto led by Carlo Carrà and heralded in Stella’s earlier archaizing works of c. 1916–18.
While engaged on his industrial subjects Stella was also executing many small-scale flower and fruit pieces in pastel together with a number of oil paintings including Tree of my Life (1919; Des Moines, IA State Educ. Assoc.), a major work in which a dense web of flowers, birds and foliage surrounds a tree-trunk surmounted by a monstrance. This painting, like Brooklyn Bridge of the same year, was organized around a central axis, a favourite compositional device. In addition, Stella did a number of monumental flower paintings, while from the early 1920s he executed many collages, which are among the best of his works. [Irma B. Jaffe. "Stella, Joseph." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 11, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T081269.]
Person TypeIndividual
Terms
